The problem with college, I thought to myself, is that you don't have to go, but everyone expects you to anyway.

Consider: in our society, if you're the kind of person who gets good grades in math and science, you're probably the kind of person that people expect to go on to do Great Things with those grades. And you're definitely the kind of person that people (parents, teachers, relatives) endlessly nudge to apply for this and that scholarship, and with enough nudging you probably end up winning some of them. And then you're really in trouble, because you've ended up as the kind of person that has other people investing financially in your academic prospects, so you're now more or less obligated to make good on their expectations.

But here's the problem: you may not be the kind of person who even wants to do Great Things or any of that stuff.

I looked around the classroom. I could tell you plenty about why a number of the other freshmen were sitting in Introduction to Applied Metaphysics.^* Bruce Harper? The money, or at least the prospect thereof; he made no secret about that. I didn't consider that invalid, really. Eric Lidenbrock? Natural egghead; you could tell just by looking at him that he was going to spend the rest of his life buried in one research project or another. They probably couldn't have kept him out of the program if they'd wanted to. Tammy Greenfield? Granted, a stunning blonde with a face a sculptor would kill to have crafted was a little more out-of-place in this kind of milieu, but if your gaze happened to drift low enough to take in the fact that she was in a wheelchair, her legs obviously atrophied from years of disuse, anybody who knew anything about the subject could tell you why she was here. Emma Shaughnessy? Same as Eric, she just dressed better.

^* (Metaphysics, of course, being the study and analysis of higher-level patterns observed in conventional physics - the search for the reasons why the low-level mechanics of the universe behave as they do, and especially for the reasons why they sometimes don't.)

And so on and so forth. Five weeks into the semester, I could tell you a why for just about every person in the classroom - except for myself. Why was I here? What did I hope to accomplish? Hell if I knew. I was here because people expected me to be here, because they figured I was qualified for this kind of thing, and if I was qualified for it then I must be cut out for it, and if I was cut out for it then it only stood to reason that I should pursue it. Right?

A gust of cold late-autumn wind stirred up a pile of dead leaves outside the J.M. Oesterlund Building, and they clattered against the window. As if on cue, the ancient heating register tucked away in the baseboard rattled as a distant furnace kicked into gear.

It was the kind of situation where people tell you it'd be a "waste" not to use your natural talents, but nobody will ever tell you what you should be using them for. But we're so insistent on it as a society that you just get this critical mass of consensus built up behind you, pushing you on towards someone else's non-goal like a boat in a storm. I was here because everybody in my life thought I should be here, and told me I should be here, and I didn't have any more compelling reason to disagree with them than I did to agree...I thought...?

I could feel my gorge rising, feel the onset of the stress. I shook my head, trying to clear my mind and focus on the lecture. Brooding wouldn't help, would it? No; better to keep my thoughts on a constructive path. I flicked over the current page of my notebook and stared at the empty, neatly-lined paper as I listened to the professor drone on.

"Now, it's a common misconception, especially thanks to the popular-science rags, but let's be clear here: the morphic field phenomenon is not some kind of indicator of anyone's 'true self.' Just like any other aspect of physics, the universe doesn't have an opinion on what you should be; it only concerns itself with what you are."

A hand went up. Inevitably, it was Lyle - the guy you get one of in every program, who decides that his role in life is to be The Smart-Ass. You could practically hear him rehearsing that scene at the start of Young Frankenstein in his head. "But how can you say that, when there's been studies clearly showing statistically-significant trends in the end result of morphic phenomena? I mean, going all the way back to Montauk..."

Dr. Stufflebeam sighed. "That's very nice, Mr. Jacobi, but it's also not what we're talking about here. Yes, there are absolutely valid questions about that, and we'll be getting into that plenty later in the course. But since you already brought up the Montauk Project, it's worth noting that it was that very research which established that it took exactly as much energy to induce a transformation from a given subject's initial state to a new form as it did to change them from their new form to something else. In short, morphic field stability is a measure of a subject's resistivity to change in general, not a measure of their affinity with one specific shape."

We all knew what they were referring to, which was what made it so tedious that Mister Smart-Ass insisted on doing this. What Lyle was getting at was the debate over the Weak Anthropomorphic Principle versus the Strong Anthropomorphic Principle, easily the most basic divide in metamorphic studies and exactly the kind of thing that popular-science magazines would write an article on every couple of months in order to catch the interest of the casual reader who liked sounding knowledgeable without having to actually work at becoming knowledgeable - i.e., Lyle.

In brief, the Weak Principle held that metamorphic experiments tended to change subjects into forms that fit more or less closely with humanoid creatures from folklore and literature because the humans involved in the experiments (on either end) exerted some kind of subconscious influence on the process, while the Strong Principle posited that the observed trends were too pronounced and consistent to be the result of subconscious personal biases, and there must therefore be something in the nature of the universe itself that preferred humanoid forms of certain types. The Weak Principle was the more accepted theory, since it didn't require the existence of any such quasi-personal entity or force, but it wasn't exactly a settled debate, either.

The Montauk Project, of course, was the most infamous research effort in the field, even though its existence had only been officially acknowledged in the late '80s. It was one of those ultra-secret Cold War things, born from an incident back in World War II where a highly theoretical experiment in teleportation had briefly removed a U.S. Navy destroyer from existence altogether, before it returned to reality with every one of the sailors aboard transformed into a mermaid. Obviously they weren't able to hide something like that indefinitely, but the War Department at the time had spun it as very probably the result of some mysterious new venereal disease, likely engineered by the Axis powers. They'd even produced a propaganda film about it; it still got played on the kitsch-theater circuits.

It was the first clearly-attested example of large-scale metamorphic phenomena in the modern era, and the first to demonstrate a link between high-energy physics and transformation. The Cold War being what it was, much of the research that followed had been classified military stuff, but this eventually fizzled out when it became clear that practical, reliable application was too far into the future to be immediately useful for warfare, and on the whole it was much more practical to just bomb people - but not, inevitably, before both the U.S. and Soviet governments had conducted a whole lot of ethically-questionable experiments to see if it was possible to reliably turn someone into any kind of viable super-soldier.^*

^* (It wasn't.)

Modern metamorphic research, thankfully, was a much cleaner, saner affair, but not a much more predictable one as yet. Even the conditions for inducing a transformative event weren't nailed down with great precision; there were known techniques, but also much debate over whether things like low-energy radiation in certain frequency bands could cumulatively destabilize someone's morphic field - in other words, whether the spread of technology like television or cell phones had anything to do with increased rates of spontaneous metamorphosis since the beginning of formal study in the early 20th century. And the prospect of reliably controlling the outcome remained a tantalizingly distant Holy Grail.

The hell of it was, there were definite patterns hinting at some kind of correlation between circumstances going into a transformative event and the end result thereof - going, yes, all the way back to the Navy destroyer and the mermaid crew - but nailing it down to the point of being predictable, let alone controllable, proved to be far more difficult than just noting down recurring patterns. Every few years, some aspiring researcher would publish a paper proposing a new interpretation of the data thus far, and like clockwork, a few months later someone would document a new change that broke the pattern. It was maddening.

Or, at least, it was for serious researchers who were genuinely invested in solving the mysteries of the universe in general and metamorphic science in particular. For myself, I wasn't even personally invested in my own success in the field, let alone anyone else's. Other people were invested in my success; my role was merely to avoid being a disappointment. I was just...here. Here because I was expected to be here.

I sighed and returned to my note-taking, because that was the thing you were expected to do in class. The lecture droned on until it was finally time for lunch.